Schnittke, Alfred. (1934-1998)

My Favourite Time ["Lyubimoye moye vremya"] - Autograph Film Score Manuscript

Autograph musical manuscript, for the Andre Khrzhanovsky film My Favourite Time ["Lyubimoye moye vremya" or "Liubimoe moe vremia"], notated in ink, signed and inscribed ("A. Schnittke Music for cartoon..."), containing six musical episodes ("Farewell to Trigorsky...Memories...Don't tempt me...Landscape...Gallop II...Ritornelle"), 4 pages, large folio, no place [probably Moscow], 1980. An attractive manuscript, scored variously for strings, celeste, cembalo, winds and brass. Neatly penned in Schnittke's small and precise hand. In fine condition. Alfred Schnittke Werkverzeichnis (Sikorski), p. 103. Rare. Film music is rarely published, and autograph sources for it are seldom offered on the market.


The 1980 All-Union Animated Cartoons Studio film "My Favorite Time" is based on Pushkin's drawings, which it animates. "Passages of the film are entirely wordless, governed by the moodiness of Alfred Schnittke's music and the inventive camera work." (David Bethea, "The Pushkin Handbook," p. 413)


The iconoclastic composer won fame in the West as he struggled against the restraints of Soviet cultural ideology at home. During the 1960s and 1970s Schnittke was one of the most prolific composers of film music in the Soviet Union, with nearly 70 credits in this field to his name. His eclectic, polystylistic style, and great flair for unusual and apt orchestration, found a natural home in this medium. The score offered here provides many examples of finely wrought textures and exquisite orchestration: for example, the syncopated, staggered entries of the flutes and clarinets (doubled by strings) over a pianissimo pedal in the evocative "Landscapes." It is perhaps not insignificant that Schnittke's very first composition of 1946 was later re-used in the soundtrack to a cartoon, and that some of his film music found its way in to his non-film music, as in the case of much of the score of the animated film The Glass Harmonica (1968), which resurfaced in the Second Violin Sonata (1987). (10805)
Autograph Document
Classical Music